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With the advent of Windows Phone 8.1, developers have the option of using WinRT native XAML stack as opposed to the Silverlight XAML the only option with early Windows Phone iterations.

One of the differences between WinRT XAML and Silverlight XAML is scaling and like with fonts, & images, scaling can have a significant effect on the look and feel of an app.

The default behavior with Windows Phone 8 was the inherent Silverlight behavior of scaling the image to fit. This meant that unless a high-resolution image was used, the image would end up looking blurred. Windows Runtime takes a different approach.

Windows 8x supports multitudes of screen sizes, resolutions and DPI. Windows Phone now supports 4 resolutions. The way Windows Runtime deals with this is by allowing developer to specify multiple images to match certain scale factors.

Windows Store Apps

Windows Phone Store Apps

1.0 (100% no scaling)

1.0 (100% no scaling)

1.4 (140% scaling)

1.4 (140% scaling)

1.8 (180% scaling)

2.4 (240% scaling)

The runtime would determine the scaling factor to use depending upon the screen size, resolution, DPI and the form factor of device in question. The developer is required to supply images for scaling 1; the other scale factors are optional. If they are supplied, they will be used if necessary.

There are two ways of supplying images to support multi-scaling support.

Specify image scale within the file name e.g. Image.scale-100.png or Image.scale-140.png

Create direct for each image scale and place images inside without specifying scaling like in 1. E.g. scale-100/Image.png or scale-140/Image.png

The attached project includes examples of both ways.

To use this and enable auto-scaling support, you specify the image as specified below

It worth noting that images set in xaml and those done codebehind behave differently at least as far as size on screen is concerned. The only way to achieve correct size as visible in xaml is to set size to that of scale 1.0 image.

Supporting Accessibility

Windows Store apps support high contrast mode. The two available options are

Black background and white foreground

White background and black foreground.

To additionally support these two accessible image formats, you need to provide scale factor 1 images named / placed appropriately. I have excluded the high contrast images from sample as windows phone was using that by default.

I use colour picker across multiple projects on both windows phone and windows 8. Allowing users a choice of colour is a good thing from experience perspective. Whilst I found a number of solutions for Windows Phone, I never really found much for Windows 8.

Last year I ported the Coding4Fun ColorHexagonPicker to use with my TableClock app.Recenly working on Scribble I needed a broader range of colours and I decided to create an appbar control that conveniently lives in AppBar.

We all know how Windows 8 introduced touch as a first class member in user input. If you have used Windows 8 it feels intuitive to touch.. hell I used to touch my non-touch laptop occasionally and not because I wanted to fondle it🙂

We also know how famously .NET components were sliced and diced (lets leave it for some other time when I have had a drink or two). So its only natural that WinRT 1.0 native XAML didn’t have Touch.FrameReported.

These made it to WinRT 1.0 XAML.. However there were changes. Now it comes armed with ManipulationMode.

The MEME RTFM definitely applies to me – I never read the manual… When we had proper MSDN lib for documentation it was all good.. now documentation is all over the place.. (Damn it… need to focus more… another thing to talk over a drink).

So what happened.. why trying to detect touch / pointer events, I started using Manipulation events but hell no.. the event’s just wouldn’t get called.. The mode has tons of options but to handle it yourself you need to set the ManipulationMode to All. Someone remind me something.. If I declare a bleeding event handler.. isn’t my intention already pretty clear ? (Something every logical from .NET lost in translation on its way to WinRT design).

So eventually I got that to work by setting ManipulationMode to All. Surprise surprise, the manipulation event args only expose a few things like Position and PointerType…So this definitely can’t do multi-touch.. sure it will detect all the touch inputs but it can’t tell the difference the two fingers!!

The PointerRoutedEventArgs that are passed to the event handers not only give you current position and intermediate positions, they also give you access to Pointer associated with the event. Each touch point / mice button gets a unique id. This way you can detect activity of each touch points over the screen.

The post is very verbose and lot of gibberish.. let me throw some code snippet to lighten it up🙂

A while back I implemented external and in-app search using search charm. This means that from anywhere in the app or even from main metro start screen, the user can start typing (which causes search to popup) and assuming they choose Cineworld, the search is passed off to my app.

Fast forward about 2 months back when I was implementing user submitted reviews for films and cinemas. I realised that the text input wouldn’t accept a single character – instead would keep showing the search charm….

aayyee.. that’s the search implementation… so I needed to selectively disable it depending upon where user is and what the user is up to.. trying to implement something meant going to layoutaware page so I don’t have to keep doing this.. whilst I was trying to figure out what to do next, I came across AllowSearch method.. strange.. then it occurred to me that I had added that while I was implementing search

so I went about calling this.AllowSearch(false); in pages where I didn’t want search enabled.

Fast forward a bit closer, last week, I was using WebView allow ticket purchase in-app.. I tried clicks etc but not the full login etc as I know that already works and that’s implemented by Cineworld themselves.. I submit that app and a user contacts me saying.. they can’t book tickets.. search charm keeps popping up…

Damn it.. I had totally forgotten about AllowSearh method. Lets hope this serves as a reminder to myself to remember this in future.
Happy coding

Many of my Cineworld app users whether its Windows Phone or Windows 8 complain about lack of in-app ticketing. In fact I would personally as a user prefer otherwise – Use tried and trusted website for ticketing as opposed to an app – sure my app might be good enough to be an official app but that’s a different issue.

So what did I do, well for Windows Phone 7 and 8, I used WebBrowser control and added in-app use of Cineworld mobile website. Most users are happy – can’t please everyone. I do remember that WebBrowser control offered many more events for management in Windows Phone 8 than in Windows Phone 7. So how about Windows 8 ?

Well Windows 8 / WinRT 1.0 ships with WebView control. This is similar is many ways to Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser control. Why do I say that ? Well, it contains LoadCompleted event to inform about page loaded but no loading event. Doesn’t expose the internal navigation stack and is substantially more painful than Windows Phone 7 Browser Control😐

I am also aware that Windows 8.1 / WinRT 1.1 (??) ships with much improved WebView that exposes all the relevant event without hacks

LoadCompleted Event: This event was exposed by the WebView and I used both maintain NavigationStack and toggle progress ring visibility

Progress Ring: Nothing can sit on top of WebView – no matter what order you define the elements in XAML. One needs to set WebView to collapsed visibility to show any other xaml content. I tend to toggle opacity to 0.5 and then show progress ring however this was a kill-joy till I found this “How to put a ProgressRing over a WebView” – easy peasy.. use WebViewBrush and paint a rectangle and hide the webview.. user cant really tell🙂

Navigation Stack: Most pages in a Windows 8 apps expose back button. By default the back button calls GoBack defined in LayoutAwarePage.cs. It is however overrideable. So what should be behaviour be ? Well if you have been browsing a few pages, backbutton should ideally unwind that stack. Since WebView doesn’t really expose Nav Stack (just like Windows Phone 7 API), we need to do the dirty work. Use Completed to push the Uri. On Back button press pop the Uri. Apart from that, we just use InvokeScript to use browser’s internal nav stack using javascript.

As you might have gathered, I
* like writing bad code
* doing things that people frown upon (like writing bad code)

Ever since I started Windows 8 Development, I miss Threads in all their glory. Sure Async Task is mostly fine but its not the same. Earlier today, Arafat asked a question about truly async logging mechanism. I suggested hacking Async Task into a thread like behaviour🙂 – actually it just gets you a threadpool thread🙂

Task.Run provides a mechanism to queue given code on a ThreadPool for parallel execution. What happens when you refuse to return the method ? well you get the ThreadPool thread as your personal bitch🙂

Update: since I was writing really bad code, I deliberately forgot to add Task.Delay. If you prefer to not write code that makes system a bit less miserable, consider adding a Task.Delay of about 1000 (1 second)

Last year I was working on Cineworld app for Windows 8. Having use LongListSelector I wanted to ensure that I can transfer the look and feel. However I was fighting multiple battles – the first one is that while LongListSelector is a single control, SemanticZoom control itself contains ZoomInView and ZoomedOutView. These are independent of each other and most examples then to show settings data to zoomed in view and then zoomed out view referring to zoomed in view. It gets messy – maybe I am just slow but it was not intuitive and took me ages.